East Punk Memories

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"You're just a street kid, you'll never be a Party Secretary!"

"Maybe you don't even exist, you don't want this life anymore!"

"Communist drug, no seduction needed!"

When the Hungarian punk band QSS launched into their anthemic song "Communist Drug" from the 1984 album Kommunista Kabito (or "Communist Stunning"), these explosive lyrics resonated in hearts and eardrums across the country. How do those same musicians feel, thirty years after the fall of communism in Hungary, about the role their music played in their country's history?

Fellow musician and contributor to the Hungarian punk record label Makhno Records, Lucile Chaufour is uniquely suited to find out. In EAST PUNK MEMORIES she takes viewers into the little-known subculture behind the mohawks. Candid, home movie-esque Super 8mm footage that Chaufour filmed in Hungary during punk's heyday is paired with contemporary interviews of the same musicians today. They bring a generation of experience to this resonant discussion of the position their music and culture has played in their country's political evolution with the passage of time.

EAST PUNK MEMORIES includes interviews with musicians Kelemen Balazs, Toth Miklos, Mozsik Imre, Marton Attila, Papp Zoltan Gyorgy, Vanyi Tamas, Rupaszov Tamas, Horvath Attila, Erds Jozsef, Vojtko Dezs, Asztalos Ildiko and Torjek Tunde while their punk bands Aurora, Bandanas, CPG, ETA, Kretens and Modells rock out on the pulsing, thrashing and cannily dissenting soundtrack.

"In the mid-eighties, defying local regulations that prohibited illegal filmmaking, Lucile Chaufour shot Super8 material about a group of Hungarian punks and how they were struggling under the communist regime. More than twenty years later, she returned several times to interview the same people about what it was like to be a punk in Hungary, what punk stood for back then and how it has changed since and also how they see life in Hungary before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Is this what they struggled for?" —RNR666

"An important contribution to a more nuanced picture of everyday life under communism... an invaluable resource to how we approach the decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall... Undergraduates in courses on Eastern Europe or history of music will delight in this glimpse of the Iron Curtain punk scene; senior scholars will find much here to begin new research." —Benita Blessing, Journal of Contemporary European History

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Main credits

Chaufour, Lucile (film director)
Chaufour, Lucile (film producer)
Chaufour, Lucile (film editor)
György, Papp Zoltán (participant)

Other credits

Montage, Lucile Chaufour; photographies, Fortepan.

MARC Record See Worldcat record

Keywords

; "East Punk Memories"; Icarus Films; Eastern Europe; music; punk; politics; political science; Hungary; rock; Germany; QSS; Makhno Records; Lucile Chaufour; ,doc,art; history

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She looks like…

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I don\'t remember her with this makeup but,

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she might even have been
my girlfriend for a while,

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you know, for a few weeks because
she looks very, very familiar but…

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[sil.]

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They thought they were fascist

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and they were right-winged. That\'s why a
lot of Hungarian punks liked this band

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because they thought by the sign
of the death, the death candies,

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oh, that was, you know,
hidden fascious symbol.

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And then, you know, the Sex Pistols had the Nazi marching
at the beginning of their record, the nevermind bullocks.

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The Ramons who were just a
plane rock and roll band,

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they had no ideas whatsoever.
But here in Hungary,

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everybody wanted to believe
that they are right-winged.

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And the 15, 16, 17, 18-year-old skinheads

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and punks in Hungary
listened to their idols,

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you know, The Death Candies and The Sex
Pistols, thought that, \"Okay, fascism is great,

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you know, we could do it because
that\'s what\'s going on the West.\"

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This is a complete misunderstanding.

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[sil.]

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I think it\'s nostalgic. It\'s nostalgic.

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I missed some of it, I hated lot of it

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but I don\'t feel any anger

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or any negative feelings,

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I don\'t have against it anymore.

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Because there was a certain kind of
beauty in it that I just cannot explain.

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A lot of things were okay but I
just felt safer in the world,

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you know, even though we had
a Russian Army up our asses,

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streets were safe, okay, you
could walk and no knifing,

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no shooting, nothing that
you see in American movies,

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you know, we didn\'t have this.
Everybody had food on the table.

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Everybody\'s fridge had food in it. You know,
everybody had enough money to buy food.

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Schooling was free, hospitals were free,

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you know, if you wanted to go to doctor, it was free. You
just had to go and say, okay, that this is my problem,

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this is my problem and they fixed it and you
went home, you didn\'t have to pay for it,

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it was paid by the state. Insurance
for cars was in the money

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that you paid for gas which was

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very, very cheap.

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We could buy the new Adidas shoes

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or we can buy the new ACDC album,

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you know, which just came out, or we
can buy a lot of things in the shops

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but when you come to think about it,
we didn\'t really need it, you know.

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Because we got by without these
things and we were still friends.

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We… we… we were created enough
to… to solve the problem.

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So of course if the state said it\'s
bad, then a lot of people said,

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\"Then it must be good because the state that
is oppressing us is saying that it\'s bad.\"

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And plus we had movies, you
know, coming from America

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and we could see what we going on there,
you know, everything was so big and,

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you know, Western hats, and
millions of dollars, and, you know,

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the musicians had the good instruments,
you know, and the good cars,

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and colour TV. I mean in the 80s,

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a lot of people still had
black and white TV in Hungary

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and a lot of apartments didn\'t…
didn\'t… didn\'t have a phone.

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We had really, really high hopes, you know,

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we thought that it\'s going
to be a better world,

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it\'s going to be everybody\'s going to be
richer, you know. A lot of people became poor,

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a lot of people became very
rich in one or two years

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and this high class, upper
class, middle class, lower class

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thing suddenly, you know, suddenly
came into existence again in Hungary.

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And a lot of people were
just not ready for it.

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Just couldn\'t say more than fuck them.
I mean we had to give chance,

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they couldn\'t use it. So the good old
political routine came in charge,

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and took over, and overpowered everyone.

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And now here we are where we
are, European fucking Union,

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united forces.

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For most of people,

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it didn\'t get too much better,
and it didn\'t quite meet

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everybody\'s expectations. It\'s like when
you first go to Disneyworld, you know.

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You expect magic to happen
and then you realise that

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it\'s just an amusement park with the guy dressed
as Mickey Mouse, you know, running around.

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[sil.]

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Politics, I think, is just as bad as
it was, I don\'t know, 20 years ago.

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We have the right-wing and the left-wing,
you know, fighting over our heads,

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doing the most disgusting
things that I don\'t even know

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why we have politics at all.

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And there is a certain
kind of a depression,

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you know, sitting on this whole country.

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Even with in my family,

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you know, we have this dispute, you
know, my mother is right-wing,

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father is left-wing, I don\'t really care

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but I\'m afraid of right-wing.

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The Hungarians blaming the Jews,

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and the Gypsies blaming the Hungarians,

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and Hungarians blaming the
Romanians, and Romanians blaming…

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[sil.]

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[music]

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[sil.]

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